Didymus The Blind

309/314 to 398. Alexandrian theologian. Although blinded at the age of four, he acquired a considerable learning and was appointed by Athanasius head of the catechetical school at Alexandria. His ability was widely acknowledged, and he numbered Antony, Rufinus, Palladius, and Jerome* among his pupils. Jerome was greatly indebted to him, and it is from Jerome we learn most about him. He translated into Latin Didymus's On the Holy Spirit, to which he prefixed a preface referring to the author as having “eyes like the spouse in the Song of Songs,” and as “unskilled in speech but not in knowledge, exhibiting in his very speech the character of an apostolic man, as well by luminous thought as by simplicity of words.” His extant works are On the Holy Spirit, On the Trinity, and Against the Manichaeans. Some of his comments on the Catholic Epistles survive, and the work Against Arius and Sabellius, usually ascribed to Gregory of Nyssa, may also be his. His extant works show little evidence of Origenism,* nor was he charged with this by Epiphanius or Theophilus. But he was charged with Origenism by Jerome, and may have been also by the Council of Constantinople in 553 which condemned Origen.